#dr cable

Propaganda:

The one where Maddys nanos removing the Special brain modifications finally take hold and she has a mental breakdown in front of captive Tally because the city council kicked her out and everybody is horrified about her human experiments. Calling it mental breakdown even if I would not call it that for any other character, but the contrast with how she usually behaves is already jarring.

Puts into perspective that she is not naturally this ruthless, brutal and cold, but that she deliberately altered her own brain because she thought she needed to do that to keep humanity safe. That she isn't mysterious with seemingly no personality traits outside of being a super soldier because bad writing, but because she deliberately gave all of that up to become a weapon for an unjust system. And that she is not able to function without that anymore.

We knew before that an altered personality and emotional capacity is part of the Special surgery, but this still feels worse than even for Tally and Shay, and just as disturbing.

Having a female villain who is a super soldier surged to be weaponized uncanny valley and who is a well-intentioned extremist so close to having a point was already amazing, especially back then, but this, this self-dehumanization, was probably what made her one of my favorite villains of all time.

Sorry for being so long. I guess I write that because I have seen a few good analyses about her as a complex villain, but haven't seen anyone but me talk about this scene, and I would be curious to see what you think?

I find Dr. Cable to be an imperfect, lonely villain who puts herself on a deliberate pedestal of perceived neurological perfection because to do anything else is to, in her eyes, return to the Before world, where the world and the life in that world was choked out by humanity's hubris ("The flowers were so beautiful, but they destroyed everything they touched" is a near direct book propaganda quote). It is also because to acknowledge she may contain an imperfection would be a failure of her perfect system. It is also because admitting imperfection is a failure of herself. She has engineered herself to see perfection as death, and she has engineered herself to be a sort of martyr for what she incorrectly believes is an ultimate good, and in that she continually engineers herself to push back the ultimate due date of her mental self-destruction. Her position is so untenable that her selfhood is all but entirely annihilated, line-bred sociopathy maximized to contain herself, an aching heart nerve-stapled into placidity and agreement with even the worst offenses in the attainment of the goal. To fail is to die, of course, or die at the hands of a self-made system. Anything but unattainable and unnatural perfection is failure.

She appears to view all but modified hubris as a threat to herself, the world, and the sanctity of her own leadership, and sees unmodified hubris like a disease that must take a more directed path of destruction lest it bring forth another wretched age of too-far human tenacity. And in her quest for this, she mentally delimbs everyone around her and creates a hierarchy system of modified hubris hellbent on defanging every citizen in a fashion that is parity or worse than unchecked capitalistic hubris. Let us not mention she was raised and groomed into this role by others from the start, that she is obviously to some degree neurodivergent, and grew up in the same system of being dehumanized from birth (which trains you to dehumanize later in life, even those which you were primed to look up to as Pretty and thus a picture of perfect human beauty - dehumanization doesn't discriminate). In the end, even the worst villain is chasing back traumas and repeating them unto others, a victim of an inflexible system that blueprints monsters neurologically and a monster who creates victims all her own.

Despite basically everybody imagining her as Tilda Swinton I really look forward to see what Laverne Cox does with the role of Dr Cable.

Hope they give her a cool afrofuturistic hairdo (the one in the drawing is heavily inspired by Rwandas Amasunzu hairstyle)

The girls are smooching

She is an absolute monster, I love her